PRACTICAL EVALUATION
The aim for my practical response was to reflect how the modern industries have started to develop their characters in to 3D. As mocap actors are often hidden, it is becoming more evident that the characters who receive a large response are the ones where reality is more integrated with the actor themselves. Whether that is through their voice, or beginning to weave their facial features in to the character themselves. For this project, I took great inspiration for how Marvel went about making the Hulk in Avengers: End Game - first making a 3D model of Mark Ruffalo's face, and then using that as a foundation to stretch and manipulate the head, maintain Mark's eye structure to show how Bruce is a part of the Hulk (and giving the actor more recognition in the process. This was shown in the case of Avatar during the earlier stages of character motion capture evolution - where 'none of the actors on Avatar was nominated for an Oscar' despite their amazing performances, and the movie itself doing so well. The actors were disregarded for the sake of technology taking the credit).
As I have never made a head in Maya before to this level of detail, I thought that trying to model a face without a human model like this would be almost impossible. Especially as the older Hulk models had lip sync for roars and minor speech, I can see how Marvel slowly began to understand the advantages of this technology with every version of the Hulk that they made - and understanding the amount of realism needed to make their character look good. The 2003 Hulk was too cartoony with little anatomy. The 2008 had too much anatomic realism to the point it looked 'stringy', as you could see every vein and muscle twitch and shine, 'it's just a generic character. It doesn't resemble Edward Norton at all.'. And then the later MCU began to integrate the actor and understand the right amount of pores and other human flaws that could be visible through using human rendering and lighting. This helped me to design a character, as before I even made up a creature, I knew that having reference and inspiration was important. Even if the 2003 Hulk used actors for the body movement and 2008 took facial reference for expressions - I would still find it hard to create a face without basing the eyes off of the ones they captured. In fact, I think it would be harder. So I knew I was going to take the 2012 Mark Ruffalo approach.. I also knew keeping it smoother in areas with a lot of texture such as scales were a bad way to go, as they would be overpowering like the veins.
I found production quite difficult, especially in the current circumstances. I'm still quite new to Maya, and even using a computer - so this practical definitely taught me a lot about computer capacity, and what causes crashes in Maya, and how far you can push the system. Because of these crashes, I didn't have very good time management - but knowing my computer's history even in just our other 503 topic, I should have made myself more time to counter anything that happened. Because of this, I also think I could have made this better by adding a little more texture and spending more time figuring out how to do the spikes.
What I think went well was that this year, I had a clear plan for my practical response that related to something that happened in the industry, and I definitely think that I met my personal criteria of having a creative response with a purpose - showing how the newer more integrated technologies have gone about developing CGI characters and how using human reference (in my case rotoscoping) can support that a lot. This shows that even the earliest form of motion capture that people didn't put faith in , rotoscoping, because it was 'considered cheating' - is very useful in modern day animation software. I'm also happy that I finished a head that used a lot of the features of both my reptile design and my own human head.
If I had more time, I would have explored the harsh textures vs the smooth textures to show why marvel failed in their earlier stages instead of trusting the process and only showing how it worked.
- Avengers: End Game (2019). Directed by J. Russo, A. Russo [Film]. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
- Dinh, C. (2019) Making Of: How VFX Transforms Mark Ruffalo to Hulk in 'Avengers: Endgame'. Available at: https://www.marvel.com/articles/movies/how-vfx-transforms-mark-ruffalo-to-hulk-avengers-endgame (Accessed: 5 October 2020)
- Avatar (2009). Directed by J. Cameron [Film]. London: 20th Century Fox.
- Hulk (2003). Directed by A. Lee [Film]. United States: Universal Pictures.
- The Incredible Hulk (2008). Directed by L. Leterrier [Film]. United States: Universal Pictures.
- Corridor Crew (2020) 'VFX Artists React to Bad & Great CGi 35' Youtube, 24 October. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADr3r_mM5h4&list=PLoQebOr539lXyhXT01rihKRtFlkdi3jM1&index=10 (accessed 24 October 2020)
- The Avengers (2012). Directed by J. Whedon [Film]. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
- Menache, A. (2011) Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation. Second edition. United States: Elsevier, Inc.
[Figure 80]
This has been my thought process during my practical responses- starting with the research, mostly in to the Hulk, the mocap behind it and its evolution through the progression of motion capture. I used the growth of this character to determine how I made my face sculpture. Using the idea of Mark Ruffalo having a 360 degree face scan to create his face model - I started to take photographs of myself until I had a good side profile and front view that lined up. Once I had this, I decided the best way to conclude my Hulk research was to turn my head in to a creature, like how Bruce Banner turns in to the Hulk. Now I had to decide on a visual style for my designs - so I looked back at The Polar Express, and how they initially tried to paint over the skin of all of the actors on set of the film, and how this failed. Looking at their style that has a very smooth painted feel - almost airbrushed, with lots of harsh shadows and exposure. I decided to carry this through to the design of my essay posters too, mixing it with the minimalism poster I made for my book research.
I used their style to paint myself, and then paint myself as a creature. As rotoscoping is about using reference, i ultimately decided that having a reference for the creature as well as my face was the best way to go. So the closest creature i personally knew to a legendary myth, was Harry the Bearded Dragon. Using what I learnt in our animism lessons at the start of the project, I humanised Harry using my own face shape - keeping the eyes the same like the Hulk, but also making some features more animated to save time consumption. After a few Maya crashes, I finally finished both faces, and decided against making lip sync for the project - as both models were closed mouthed anyway, and the polygons begun struggling and overlapping during the modelling process - so I think moving that many vertexes would have destroyed the model or crashed my very slow computer.
[Figure 81]
[Figure 82]
This is a final representation of what I think describes my practical process throughout this topic.
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